Nation readers should be excused for wondering whether they were in some sort of time warp as the Supreme Court closed its term with a slew of decisions that recalled the halcyon days of Chief Justice Earl Warren. In a single week, the Court upheld affirmative action, issued a trailblazing gay rights decision, reversed a death sentence for ineffective assistance of counsel (for only the second time in the two decades that this right has existed) and threw out a sex offense conviction for violating the Constitution's ex post facto clause.

And that's not all. Earlier in the term, the Court shocked Court-watchers by ruling that Congress could require the states to pay damages for violating the Family and Medical Leave Act, halting in its tracks a troubling line of states' rights decisions. It made it extremely difficult for states to medicate mentally incompetent criminal defendants in order to render them competent to stand trial. And it upheld, against a right-wing "property rights" challenge, a critically important state program for funding pro bono legal services with the interest from lawyers' trust accounts.

What's going on here? Is this the same Supreme Court that contravened all its own principles to find in the equal protection clause a basis for anointing George W. Bush as President in the 2000 election, that has systematically eroded the Constitution's protections for the criminally accused and that has shown far more concern for the rights of state treasuries than of abused citizens? How does one explain this sudden concern for individual rights and equality?

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